Last night’s dream is a memory.  Last night my doctor phones me with the diagnosis.  Now the blue black tar of fear keeps sucking me down.  The dream is not so much a dream as a visceral reliving.  We are in Hilton Head, my brother and I and our parents, where we vacationed during every childhood summer.  I just turned twelve, my brother is seven.  It is the third day of our vacation, a Tuesday.  We have spent another afternoon at the beach bodysurfing, reading under the umbrella, digging for shells in the hot white whorls of sand and lifting what we find to the high sparkle of sun.  We are at our favorite restaurant, sitting in the glassed-in porch with the wide sprawling view of the smooth moss-hued lake.  The sun skips and twinkles through the windows as if we are inside a diamond.  Sun-clawed tired with sun-sparked skin and aching with bliss, we are laughing as we order our mussels and flounder and carrots. 

            I really think I can feel myself smiling through my sleep.

            I do not yet know I am reliving a memory, for if I did, if I knew I am re-living this memory, I would not be smiling.

            Our mussels arrive and we scoop them like precious treasures.  Then I notice mt father pointing his fork at the window.  He makes a throated grunt, and we all look over.  The wide sprawling lake, which used to have a tall arcing fountain in its center a year earlier and was, just a moment ago, as placid as a new polished mural, is now split by a slow, rolling wake.  Like the water is being moved by breath.  There is no clear reason for it—until a small dome of dark grey opens the surface in a long, thin arrow, shading the hue of smooth moss behind it a rippled black.

            “Alligator,” my parents say at the same time.

            “Gnarly,” Zach says, and smushes his burnt forehead against the glass window.

            My father, missing the thrill of sermonizing, mounts his voice.  “Six fatalities,” he says, “in just the past five years in South Carolina.  A woman on this very island was walking her dog on a golf course beside a lagoon and one of these got her.”  He jabs his fork at the glass window.  “That kind of dangerous, careless living,” my father says, and, with a tense flinch of disdain, of disgust, of cold blatant regret, he glares straight at me, “will always in the end make you pay.”

            “Oh cut that out, Samuel,” my mother says, and shoves her plate away.  She reaches for my hand and I yank my hand away.  She stares at my father.  “The odds of that.”

            My father’s jaw flexes.  “Sure, talk about odds.  Stats.  Numbers.”  My father jabs his fork at my mother.  “Why don’t we talk about the feelings of those who will never be the same again because their loved one decided to live their life based on what theythought would not happen?”

            Before I can react, my mother whips her hand across the table and caresses my wrist, for maybe I look terrified and need comforting.  My brother, oblivious, widens his hands on the glass window.  My discomfort and terror seem to rise and spread in direct proportion to my brother’s fascination and awe.  “So cool,” Zach murmurs, mesmerized.

            My mother and I do not eat our flounder or carrots.  My father and brother eat our flounder and carrots so “money will not be wasted.”  The rest of the week my father and brother go to the beach in the afternoons.  My mother and I go early, as the sun slowly tips the wavering horizon pink.  Every chance he gets, my father espouses in his strong righteous voice all the dangers of living carelessly, of the sacrifices one needs to make to live safely, and how those who do not respect all the intricacies of the potential for danger deserve their rightful fate.

            This morning I can’t get out of bed.  I keep staring at the cell in my white white palm.  The cell wobbles as my white white palm shakes.  It’s like I’m staring at it because I believe it will free me from the blue black tar of fear that keeps sucking sucking me down.  I don’t know why, but this time my father answers.  Ever since their divorce, he has accused my mother and I of “conspiring against him.”  It doesn’t matter that she is now gone.  What matters, what has always mattered, is that I am gay.

            My father does not speak into the dead air.

            “Well, you were right, Dad,” I say.  “I guess I lived dangerously.  And carelessly.  I did not make the sacrifices I needed to.”

            My father does not speak into the dead air. 

            “So maybe I deserve this virus you feared would kill me ever since I told you when I turned twelve who I really am.”

            I give him time.  I don’t know why, but I can’t hang up even as the blue black tar of fear begins to chew, even as my body cracks. 

            That night in Hilton Head, after dinner, my father enters my room and slumps on my bed.  I know it is my father because liquor sails off his breath.  His back leans against the back of my legs.  His arm straightens out along my shoulder.  He spreads his fingers around my wrist so lightly I briefly wonder if it is my mother who is drunk.  The caress is gone and I know again it is my father.  Then my father stands, and from somewhere outside in the hall, as he closes the door, I think I hear my father say, “I love you.”

            Now, I listen to my father’s silence consume the dead air.  Plunged into my new serrated world of fear, I want to believe that words can travel across time, even if as a slow, rolling wake.

By James Hartman

Litro Magazine

family Fathers and Sons fear flash fiction illness Litro Stories memory Queer fiction southern gothic